All and Each: A Socio-Technical Review of the Europeana
ProjectRhiannon Stephanie
BettiviaUniversity of Illinois, Urbana-ChampaignRbettivi@illinois.edu

Rhiannon Bettivia is a postdoctoral research associate at the University
of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her research examines the politics and
discourses of the growing sub-field of digital preservation and
investigates new methodologies for preserving the interpretive framework
for digital materials. She has published in the

International Journal of Digital Curation about her work on
the IMLS grant Preserving Virtual Worlds
II, among other publications and presentations in the fields of
information science, digital humanities, and communications. She also
teaches in the areas of digital preservation, metadata, and the role of
libraries and information in society in the School of Information
Sciences at the University of Illinois.
Elizabeth StainforthUniversity of Leedse.m.stainforth@leeds.ac.uk

Elizabeth Stainforth is a Visiting Research Fellow in the School of Fine
Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies, University of Leeds, UK. Her
research investigates digital heritage cultures and the contemporary
significance of memory for cultural heritage in the wake of digital
technologies. She has published in the journals

Museum and Society,
Cultural Trends and The Journal of Curatorial Studies, among others, and
is one of the editors of parallax journal. She also works for Leeds
University Library, where she has been involved in projects with the
Digital Content and Repositories Team, Special Collections and the
Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery.
000318011328 August 2017article

Digital technologies offer opportunities for engagement with cultural heritage
resources through the development of online platforms and databases. However,
questions have been raised about whether this type of engagement is structurally
open or bounded by pre-existing institutional frameworks. Michel Foucault’s
later work on governmentality speaks to this concern and identifies in
modes of government the mutually reinforcing relation of all and each, to develop those elements constitutive of individuals’
lives in such a way that their development also fosters that of the
strength of the state. This article takes Foucault’s insight as a point of departure for
thinking about how digital technologies are mediating and structuring the
relationships between individuals and organizations, using the European
Commission-funded Europeana project as a case study. Europeana is the embodiment
of all and each as a technique of government: it functions by fostering the
contributions of individuals and national audiences in a way that celebrates
their diversity, while also engaging in a project to systematically standardize
and unify. Examination of the technical elements of Europeana reveals the
political imperatives implicit in its technical operations, and how the
parameters for audience participation are subsequently defined. In this article,
we examine the audiences explicitly and implicitly delimited by Europeana, and
then analyze them in relation to the project’s development of the European Data
Model (EDM) for the interchange of metadata about cultural heritage objects. The
article concludes that a lack of explicit definitions about audiences, what
Europeana is, and how its various parts work in concert constitute a
definitional void. This void is a technique of government in
that it absorbs difference and is deliberately vague. It involves power
relations that are hard to center and render visible, and it is thus difficult
to detect which actors are occupying a space of privilege. We suggest some
tentative strategies for addressing this problem by attending to the sites of
awkward engagement and difference that are currently masked in the technical
framing of Europeana.

Considering how digital technologies are mediating and structuring the
relationships between individuals and organizations by way of a case study of
the Europeana project

Introduction

The logic of participation and shared ownership, frequently glossed as the
democratization of knowledge, belies much of the public discourse around digital
heritage web technologies (see, e.g., ). However, the
institutional imperatives that drive the development of such technologies have
sometimes given cause for unease about the maintenance of autonomy for those
using them . Most often, debates focus on how far
the enabling aspects of online participation at the same time pose a threat to
control over personal content; how the ephemeral nature of digital content
serves to further entrench the existing politics of dominant memory narratives;
or how the tensions play out between digital heritage in official memory
institutions and community-oriented or personal projects.

Michel Foucault’s later work on governmentality speaks to these concerns
and also challenges the personal-institutional dichotomy they presuppose. He
identifies in modes of government the mutually reinforcing relation of all and
each, which seeks to develop those elements constitutive of individuals’
lives in such a way that their development also fosters that of the
strength of the state. Here, we investigate the move of all and each as it relates to the
longstanding goal of European integration, and efforts to confirm Europe as a
unified entity through the notion of a shared cultural heritage. The Europeana
project is the case study through which these issues will be examined
further.

Europeana is a database and website that offers access to digitized items from
over 2500 of Europe’s museums, libraries and archives. Funded by the European
Commission (EC), the European Union’s (EU) executive body, Europeana
demonstrates the move of all and each very clearly in its aim to promote a
distinctly European space online for heterogeneous cultural objects and
experiences. It is precisely the involvement of individual users and
organizations that furthers this aim; the former group search for and submit
content to it, while the latter are the primary donors of cultural heritage
metadata. The parameters for user participation are subsequently defined
according to these operations, which potentially limits the nature of audiences’
relationships with it.

Our interest here is in the way audience-organization relations are represented
and delimited by technology. In this case study, we examine how such relations
present themselves within the socio-technical network of Europeana, and how
audience conceptions operate as techniques of government on the part of the EC.
We discuss the interplay between the EC’s cultural policies and the techniques
enacted through Europeana and show how the dynamic of all and each is manifested
at different levels of the project. Digital platforms like Europeana, because of
their scale, their partial (at best) success/adoption, and their nebulous
geographic location are an interesting site for further exploration of these
issues.

Our argument proceeds via an investigation of several technical elements of the
project, particularly the European Data Model (EDM) for aggregation and the
application program interface (API). A conglomerate of existing metadata
standards, the EDM was designed to facilitate the aggregation of digital
cultural heritage objects (CHOs) for the construction of the public memory
portal found at europeana.eu. The technical premise of Europeana, and its data
model, entail interoperability, which have political implications when
considered in light of the EC’s drive for greater social and political cohesion
in Europe. However, the political dimensions of interoperability are seldom, if
ever, owned by developers. The article concludes that a lack of explicit
definitions about audiences, what Europeana is, and how its various parts work
in concert constitute a definitional void. This void is a technique
of government in that it absorbs difference and is deliberately vague. It
involves power relations that are hard to center and render visible and it is
thus difficult to detect which actors are occupying a space of privilege. We
suggest some tentative strategies for addressing this problem by attending to
the sites of awkward engagement and difference that are currently masked in the
technical framing of Europeana.

All and Each

In the 1979 lecture,

Omnes et Singulatim: Towards a
Criticism of Political Reason, Foucault proposed that Western
modes of government rely on the limited freedom of individuals for their
continued functioning, an idea that both parallels and challenges debates about
cultural production and the public consumption of digital heritage. Instead of
stating the relationship between organizations and audiences in oppositional
terms, Foucault identifies the mutually reinforcing relation of all and
each. He writes, right from the start, the state is both individualizing
and totalitarian […] Its inevitable effects are both individualization
and totalization. Liberation can only come from attacking, not just one
of these two effects, but political rationality’s very roots. While the reference to the state is somewhat misleading, since, for
Foucault, the state has no essence and is a function of changes in the practice
of government, the suggestion that these totalizing and individualizing effects
work to bolster one another is an important insight. In a passage from Governmentality, Foucault clarifies his theory
further: What government has to do with is not territory
but, rather, a sort of complex composed of men and things. The things, in
this sense, with which government is to be concerned are in fact men, but
men in their relations, their links, their imbrication with those things.

These relational networks are composed of humans and things, both technological
and analog. In fact, in speaking about entities like the EU, the EC or
Europeana, we are employing simplistic terms to denote incredibly complex
networks of persons and technologies, as well as technological representations
of analog things . Technologies in the broad sense are
understood by Foucault as techniques of government such as programs, apparatuses
and calculations. There is a growing recognition that processes and power
structures are inflected in the way new technologies are being developed,
practices that are often specialized and opaque ; ; . Such in-scriptions may or may not play out as designers intend when
technologies are implemented, and mismatches between design and actual use
explain, in part, why some are successful and why others fail. Understanding
potential ethical and political issues requires greater knowledge of the way
technologies are created, how they work, and how they are ultimately deployed.
This approach, a socio-technical analysis based on theories of governmentality,
informs our discussion of digital technologies in the cultural heritage
context.

Furthermore, we suggest that the dynamic of all and each is particularly relevant
to this context and offers a method of investigating, more closely, the
negotiation of audience relationships and the individual-institution dichotomy.
As Chiara de Cesari notes, heritage scholars have been too focused on the
centralization, homogenization and cultural imperialism of heritage regimes and
insufficiently attentive to the capacities of decentralized groups, e.g. local
communities, or historically marginalized peoples .
The all and each relation highlights the interplay of power relations at
different scales and is linked to another important
aspect of government: that it is not always successful in its regulative aims.
Its strategies are therefore diverse and undergoing constant revision. Rosemary
Coombe and Lindsay M. Weiss explain: Government, in short,
“is a congenitally failing operation;” unanticipated outcomes emerge from
the intersection of diverse technologies, the conjunction of new techniques
and old conditions enable things to work in new and different ways.

The technologies that have been developed within and through the Europeana
project provide an opening for exploring how such failures are manifested in
practice, how they are adapted and re-aligned with the aims of government and
how these renegotiations require the enrollment of a variety of audiences.

Europeana and the Drive for Cultural Unity [in Diversity]

The story of the development of Europeana is bound up with the EC’s ongoing
commitment to fostering European unity, emphasizing transnational, rather than
national, institutions and affiliations . The
original impetus for the initiative came from a perceived threat to Europe’s
economic interests after the announcement of the Google Books Project in 2005.
Amid worries that companies like Google would transfer a considerable volume of
cultural heritage content into the private sector, the proposal was made for an
equivalent European program, premised on open access and non-exclusive rights
.

In 2008, the prototype Europeana database was launched, the appellation making
its transnational affiliations clear. This was in line with EU strategies, since
the 1980s, to promote the formation of a cohesive European identity through its
cultural programs . Formation is an important notion
here, because the aim of these strategies is to create something new, built on
existing histories and cultural heritage. As Cris Shore observes, in many respects, what the [EC] is doing is not
dissimilar to that which nationalist elites achieved during the
formation of European nation-states in the nineteenth century: i.e.
mobilising symbols and inventing traditions in order to give flesh and
credibility to a new political order (see also ). Yet difficulties stem from
attributing European meanings to manuscripts and artworks that are
associated with specific national-historical narratives. Likewise, the very
different circumstances from which the nation states of Europe have developed
present a challenge to the idea of a coherent European identity. Cultural
programs have attempted to overcome such disparities by inscribing diversity
into the model for European integration and endorsing the idea of unity in diversity; . Such language
connotes the move of all and each in that diverse local projects become mutually
constitutive of larger governmental discourses. Foucault describes how the logic
of modern political rationality can be understood as a permanent integration of
individuals in a totality and, vice versa, a mode of governing that regulates
individual conducts or, rather, requires individuals to self-regulate conduct.
This is liberalism, namely a constant correlation between an increasing
individualization and the reinforcement of a totality ; .

The motif of unity in diversity also echoes existing debates in heritage studies
about the move from monocultural to multicultural forms ; .
Narratives and representations of local and national heritage, and the roles
they play in the constitution of larger, pan-national projects, are important as
they manifest themselves in these relational structures. One view is that the
assimilation of peoples and nations into larger social and political entities is
accompanied by the increased diversity of local traditions and practices . On this interpretation, cultural difference is
potentially reconcilable with the emergence of broader transnational entities.
The vision expressed by initiatives like Europeana, that cultural diversity can
be a part of European identity, suggests a similar model but it is difficult to
discern how it works in practice, especially when such narratives are imported
into the technical space .

In the face of vast collections like those of Europeana, a selective approach to
representation is required to make the content serviceable. The concern is that,
if the task of representing European culture in all its forms proves
insurmountable, then unity becomes a legitimating gloss for a discourse of
European culture that is limited to a narrow construction of cultural heritage.
In this context, the need to both define and safeguard European interests
reflects the difference by which Europe has historically distinguished itself
from other territories .

However, the political uncertainty surrounding Europe has resulted in a need for
the EC to circumvent disputes that arise from talking about a unified European
entity directly. Anthropological research into the EC indicates that this is
manifested at an organizational level as well. Abélès suggests that the
underlying paradigm of the European political process is less one of unification
than of harmonization and rationalization. That is, European political practice
aims to influence national politics without spelling out its political goals; he
writes: everything is working as if Europe was destined to
remain a virtual object. The concept of virtual Europe clarifies the way in which unity in
diversity reproduces forms of identification and difference and reflects the
indefinite geographical and governmental status of Europe.

As we will go on to argue, these relations continue to be replicated at various
scales through the creation and implementation of cultural heritage
technologies, including Europeana. There are also clear ways in which the policy
trajectory of Europeana has changed during its lifespan, which is consistent
with flexibility as a practice of government. Here, we conduct an analysis of
Europeana’s conception of its audience over time as the project priorities
shift; in this way, it is possible to understand Europeana’s changing
self-conception and its relationship with European state and identity politics.
We take as material for analysis a series of papers produced by or at the behest
of people involved in various aspects of Europeana, with a particular focus on
the API and the data model. These materials represent different points in
Europeana’s development, including:

2008 – The launch and trial of Europeana as an aggregator for
metadata.2010-12 – The development of both the API and the EDM.2013-15 – Re-launch of the website in response to claims of underuse and
the introduction of the Europeana 1914-1918 project.

Notions of audience, both implicit and explicit, at each of these stages reflect
the adaptations Europeana makes in order to position itself as a successful
digital cultural heritage platform, although we acknowledge the difficulty
entailed in defining success in this context. With each new phase of
development, Europeana speaks to different audiences, including cultural
heritage institutions in member states and elsewhere; internal and external
technology developers; individual content donors; and the projected users who
will search the platform to access digital representations of cultural heritage
objects (CHOs). This latter group is represented by individual users within
Europe, yet given its partnerships with non-European heritage institutions,
there is also the aspiration to reach a more global audience. Decisions taken
about technology primarily reflect the positioning of Europeana in relation to
its users. These different users and Europeana itself are both implicated in the
European identity the EC promotes. It is not insignificant that the structuring
of the EDM also, superficially, reflects this idea of unity, which we will
discuss below.

Despite pushing for a kind of unity, Europeana is underpinned by disparate
metadata and collections information. This implies a political manoeuvre:
Europeana is, on one level, an absolute expression of unity in diversity (it
works as an aggregator of disparate data) but only in cases where those terms
are representative of standards and data models. The vexed political question of
how unity in diversity actually works is left to one side. As discussed by
Abélès, unity in diversity is a process of harmonization and rationalization,
and one that operates via a definitional void: when Europeana fails to define
its terms, assumptions and dominant power relations risk becoming further
entrenched.

Europeana and its Audiences

How does Europeana work and what is its emphasis? This question is not trivial,
and it is telling that at a 2016 heritage studies conference, the authors
encountered far more people who had never heard of Europeana than people who
could describe the project and its aims. Answering the question requires an
understanding of what the name ‘Europeana’ encompasses. For example, Antoine
Isaac et al speak about the multiple priorities and user groups of Europeana,
which belies the fact that it is not a single entity, nor does it have a single,
sweepingly agreed-upon identity for its users and creators . Europeana is a complicated socio-technical
network comprising many components that change over time. Here, we recognize a
few of them, including the public-facing web portal; the API and the developers
behind this; and macro-level policy makers who act as intermediaries between the
various manifestations of the Europeana project and the EC.

The public-facing part of the project is represented by a web platform which
offers access to digitized items from national museum, library and archive
collections across Europe.

The landing page of europeana.eu

Its earliest iteration was modeled on the idea of a digital library. However, it
is also a database that enables participating cultural heritage organizations to
engage with a large volume of digital content, primarily metadata about digital
surrogates for CHOs. Those involved in its development have shown an awareness
of this public platform/back-end database duality: To the
general public, Europeana is primarily perceived as a portal exposing a
great amount of cultural heritage information. Even though this perception
is not entirely misleading, the main goal of Europeana is rather to build an
open services platform enabling users and cultural institutions to access
and manage a large collection of surrogate objects representing digital and
digitized content via an application program interface (API).

A more pointed quote that concludes the same paper demonstrates a measure of
tension in how the greater Europeana project is defined: Finally, Europeana is much more than a portal: even though offering portal
functionality its main technical incarnation is the Application Programming
Interface (API) on which the portal services will be built.

As indicated, Europeana has conceived of itself and its relationship with users
in different ways over its lifespan, and this is indicative of a number of
tensions that have persisted within it. What Europeana is or does is informed by
some early key policy decisions, chief among these the decision not to store any
digital objects itself. Rather, Europeana holds metadata about digital objects
from national collections. In other words, by using Europeana’s search portal,
users are looking at aggregated metadata about digital surrogates for heritage
objects: for example, an image file representing a painting and data about the
museum to which it belongs, its size, and what the paint and backing media are
etc. Europeana does not save or hold these art objects or their digital images:
it simply collects data about them. When users click through the content
represented at europeana.eu, they are directed away from Europeana proper to the
website of the particular institution that holds the analog object and that
contributed the digital surrogate and its data to the Europeana database.
Example: if you want to know more about the

Mona
Lisa, Europeana will direct you to the Louvre’s website.

Concerns about ownership, and especially about the ability to point to web
traffic as a metric for successful community engagement, pervade discussions
about how Europeana should interact with one of its key audiences: cultural
heritage institutions donating their data about their collections: Europeana’s approach to aggregation is very reasonable:
aggregate the metadata, but access the digital objects from the providers’
sites. This allows the provider to brand the content with their own identity
and to offer up navigation and context pertinent to the content. It also
precludes the need for Europeana to have to centrally store all of the
digital objects and the responsibility for preservation remains with the
owning institution.

The technological discussions raise this same concern: Cesare Concordia el al
call for both a unified mentality shift when
dealing with large scale aggregations while also noting that ownership must be
clearly visible to two additional key audiences: imagined users who will visit
the portal and search for content and those who will build applications and
other projects on top of the data and data model .

If the foregoing section identifies three audiences – the individual searching
via the portal, the cultural heritage institutions that submit CHOs, and
developers using the API – there are a further two audiences implied in the case
set of texts about Europeana, though they are not necessarily explicitly defined
as such therein. Karen M. Wickett et al point to the audiences implied in the
functional roles of collections and collection description: individual users accessing or contributing content,
system developers seeking to improve search experiences, and
institutions providing data to federated aggregations. This suggests the fourth audience, which emerges through more recent
projects like Europeana 1914-1918, for the World War I centenary. By relying on
individuals to submit content directly, based on personal or family experiences
of the War, the fourth audience is distinct from the other donor audience of
(often publicly or state-sponsored) cultural heritage institutions. We also
argue that there is a fifth audience construction here, and that this is
precisely a mirror of self, the I in I-methodology . This last audience manifests itself in Europeana in
a few ways. Firstly, there is an actual user base which is constructed via the
peers and colleagues of those involved in the Europeana technical programs, and
secondly, there are the technologies developed for Europeana, which act as a
mirror of self, both in the sense of mirroring the ideological and
epistemological standpoint of the developers but also in the sense that
technological tools mirror the nebulous identity construction of the larger
Europeana project.

Developments that stem from Europeana, like the creation of the data model (EDM)
and an interface designed to encourage developers to use Europeana (the API) are
inflected with the identities designers have in mind and who they think they are
talking to. For example, Concordia et al write about the Europeana API to
differentiate it from other portals and other digital libraries . In fact, the authors imply that the
technical designers do not talk to Europeana portal users, and distance
themselves from the notion that Europeana is a portal at all. Rather, they
describe the portal as simply one small use of the API, and this branch of
research and development is seen as distinct from work on the EDM. While they
are both technological projects under the general Europeana umbrella, exchanges
on Google user group pages for Europeana’s API highlight the gulf between those
who see themselves as working on the API versus those who work on the data
model. In one instance, when someone on a forum asked a question regarding a
functional ontology for their home institution, in this case a museum, they were
quickly referred away to the EDM people by the API Google group. Yet the
Concordia et al paper, which argues for an understanding of Europeana as an API,
counters this notion by appealing to different audiences . That is to say, it is an API for those
developers in the know: those already working at Europeana and those developers
Europeana hope will take up the API.

A competing discourse arises when the primary user audience is invoked, the
non-specialist who uses the europeana.eu search bar to look for art works. These
portal users are coded by the technical authors as detached from the complexity
of the underlying technologies, such as the call method architecture, data
system levels, and functionalities. At the same time, Concordia et al use
language about hiding things in the API and a techno-centric discourse is
employed to purposefully mask the complexity of these functionalities behind
graphical user interfaces (GUIs): in this case, the simple search box on the
website landing page .

These issues draw attention to Europeana’s lack of definition around audiences.
Because it does not concretely define audience when speaking to its
audience writ large, it implicates a variety of actors with different
interests and levels of power in relation to the project. Defining the various
audiences of Europeana would require the explicit designation of
techno-audiences, including second-party developers at partner institutions and
external third-party developers like the humanistic researcher
investigating watermarks on historical documents. Instead, Europeana literature
switches back and forth between discussions of the first four distinct audiences
as though they fit within the same group; moreover, it never addresses the fifth
I audience explicitly.

What is the potential impact of eliding distinct audiences in this way? When
audiences are assumed rather than defined, they default to norms that reinforce
existing power relationships. Developers design for themselves, representing
assumed users on both the technological side, where API users may in fact share
many traits with Europeana developers, and on the public access side, where
portal users – often school children doing class projects – probably do not. As
such, the portal model suffers from not being what casual access users need in
technical terms: online access to collections is not serving a clear
user need. Europeana promotes itself as a rich resource with enough depth to
support serious research, yet this kind of take-up by scholars has not been
seen, on the portal side or on the API side. In all these discussions, another
key audience is never mentioned because it is obscured in the definitional
vacuum of Europeana itself: what do heritage institutions get out of their
participation in Europeana? This is part and parcel of the tension around
concepts of ownership, mentioned earlier, and speaks to the all and each
relationship whereby individual contributions are re-aligned with the totalizing
effects of government.

Europeana structures itself around its projected audiences. The most clearly
identifiable organizational audiences are also what it relies on to provide
content: both organizations and individuals donating content as well as
individuals searching for content. Yet Europeana also structures itself around
audiences that are less explicitly defined, such as those that are incorporated
into the design of the API and the EDM, which we will address in greater detail
in the next section. Europeana emphasizes the fact that it wants to
incorporate/absorb existing descriptive metadata structures in use by partner
institutions: it builds on many standards that are in popular use to maximize
the ease of interoperability and encourage the participation of institutional
partners . This type of move reflects the
policy motif of unity in diversity – unification through the aggregation of
diverse heritage.

When the audience is functionally a mirror of the project creators, both the EC
and the tech developers, it does not necessarily reflect the way people would
actually use or contribute to a digital heritage portal. As Ben Roberts writes, how meaningful is such participation when its terms and
vocabulary are decided elsewhere? Indeed, what can appear to happen in
such debates is a kind of staged engagement with the outside, one which
simply mirrors the political establishment. This tension is further complicated by the fact that success in this
realm is difficult to define: while it is often lamented that students are the
most prevalent group of users of the portal, it is unclear who else might use
Europeana on a regular basis. The development of the EDM, to which the
discussion will now turn, highlights similar issues with regard to the potential
problems that arise in the uncertain space between the developers’ ambitions and
the needs of organizational and individual users.

The EDM

The Europeana Data Model (EDM) is the successor of the European Semantic Elements
(ESE), metadata which were used to describe the digital objects aggregated by
Europeana. Both the ESE and EDM govern the use of metadata in the larger
Europeana project, with the aim of creating interoperability between discrete
digital collections. The EDM came about in response to claims that the ESE was
inadequate to properly express the relationships between CHOs and their digital
surrogates. The EDM, a Resource Description Framework (RDF)-based data model,
incorporates the existing elements from the ESE, along with additional elements
from several other common metadata schemas such as Simple and Qualified Dublin
Core (title, format, author, etc); it is also compatible and partly aligned with
the major cultural heritage ontology, CIDOC-CRM (; ). The EDM was implemented as part of Europeana’s
Linked Open Data (LOD) pilot. The documentation about the LOD pilot indicates
the shifting nature of Europeana’s project: EDM creators note the fact that the
LOD pilot was limited from the outset given that the Data Exchange Agreement
between donors and Europeana did not specifically call for partner institutions
to give permissions to make metadata publicly available. Linked open data, as
the open in its name suggests, is based on the ability to share metadata
to make linkages work. Because the agreement partner institutions sign with
Europeana does not entail public permissions, the exchanges of metadata
necessary to link data openly are limited. Isaac et al write about the process
of moving Europeana’s database towards open data, explaining: It was important that the solution chosen by Europeana should
reuse existing standards and be flexible enough in its approach to
interoperability to allow their coexistence with custom ones from across the
sector. Because Europeana wants to reuse and be reused, a web-based open
technology was ideal to make it simple to connect data together and share
it. Such semantic web and linked data technologies directly relate to open
data strategies.

This type of language also exemplifies attempts by those involved with Europeana
to unify elements of the project, and to project backwards a more unified vision
of Europeana’s development than other events on the timeline indicate. To
maximize interoperability, the EDM builds on a commonly used schema like the
Dublin Core Internet metadata standard. As Ashraf Amad and Nasreddine Bouhaï
explain, its primary objective is to unify descriptions
originating from various metadata providers to make data accessible on
the Europeana website independently of the metadata schema used by the
provider. In this way, cultural heritage institutions can move local data about
CHOs directly into the EDM without having to do metadata
crosswalking, which is to say without engaging in the
practice of translating some fields for information to match those fields
existing in a different standard that might have different rules or use
different types of vocabularies. This type of functionality indicates a shift
away from a sole focus on schema development towards creating methods for
interoperability and translation between existing schemas .

However, the creation of the EDM raised concerns about a
flattening of relationships between pieces of
information. Specifically, the need to attribute authority to particular
statements presented technological challenges to the developers. We identify two
sources of these challenges, although there are likely more. Firstly, the need
for proper attribution stems from the complex negotiations between donating
institutions who need to demonstrate clear ownership of artworks and the
associated digital surrogates and metadata. Secondly, the EDM has to contend
with potentially conflicting information given to Europeana by its numerous
donors. RDF, the framework used by the EDM, employs simple triples to structure
data: a subject and an object are linked by a predicate, or property .

An explanation of the basic structure of RDF from creator W3C’s
documentation
RDF triples employed in the EDM

Europeana relies on its relationships with content donors who were, until the
1914-1918 World War I project, primarily cultural heritage institutions from the
Eurozone. Such donors are contributing valuable data to Europeana: Europeana
relies on these institutions to create more or less interoperable metadata on
which the entire database and platform run and therefore relationships with
these institutions must be cultivated. If two contributing institutions submit
conflicting metadata about the same CHO, say, for example, one attributes an
anonymous artwork to one artist while another institution attributes it to
someone else, standard database logic does not allow for such contradictions to
exist simultaneously: accommodating contradictions within a database permits it
to represent all its assertions as true, as well as all its negations, which
would bring down a functional database. Yet Europeana requires a structure that
allows institutions to retain their own information as authoritatively true
precisely because it aims to side-step disagreements about artist attribution.
Therefore, developers opted for a mechanism that allows contradictions to exist
within the database without ruining the database’s functionality. This is
accomplished through the use of proxy elements which attribute the
authority of statements to a particular agent. Isaac et al describe the proxies
as Enabl[ing] the separation of different views of the same
item that may be the focus of multiple aggregations from different
providers. In every case, there will be one proxy for the provider
descriptive data for an item and another for the data created by Europeana.

Europeana developed the proxy notion from the Open Reuse and Exchange (ORE)
specification . Proxies separate the items themselves
from the information about them. As such, a work of art can simultaneously be
attributed to two different artists with the caveat that one attribution comes
from one authority, while the second comes from another.

From the EDM primer, a diagram wherein we have noted the use of proxies
(emphasis added by the authors in red).

These contradictions are especially important in the cultural heritage sector
when representing information such as provenance, which can be questionable and
institutionally dependent, or date ranges which differ depending on perspectives
and definitions. Contradictions must be represented in a way that retains the
integrity of the database structure, and this can be challenging. For example,
in an LOD project using CIDOC-CRM to create an interoperable LOD dataset of
World War I data and objects, the authors note: formal encoding of such different viewpoints has been
discussed, but remains future work. The proxies in EDM are designed to accommodate both the programmers, who
accept an inelegant use of RDF because it allows for functional programs, and
the cultural heritage providers, who can claim authority over their own
collections.

The politics embedded in the technological foundations of the EDM allow the
contributing institutions a measure of autonomy that has, in turn, solidified
the functionality of the Europeana project as a whole. There is a difficulty in
the work of an aggregator like Europeana in that it is engaged, by definition,
with many partners. As such, this tension can be described partly as one of
scale: in moving beyond a single institution, Europeana must find a way to grant
a visible measure of authority to many partners across many nations.

Digital archive technologies describe such problems of scale for heritage
representations as technical ones, thus depoliticizing or decentring the friction that inherently occurs in multi-scalar projects like Europeana. Anna
Tsing uses the term friction to signal the awkward sites of interconnection
across difference . Collaborative partners
that share the same goals without necessarily sharing other commonalities embody
a similar friction. The EDM corresponds to the way friction works, proposing a
technological solution for what is an inherently political problem in a way that
decenters the power dynamics that arise when actors at individual,
organizational, national, and supranational scales are thrown together.

A key feature of the governmental rationality of all and each is that it can be
made to accommodate the politics of difference. It is flexible and aimed at
absorbing that which initially seems to unsettle it, making the seamful appear
seamless . The use of proxies in the EDM is an
example of this seamlessness and the way in which it is used to accommodate
difference. A purposefully seamful way to handle disparities in data would
acknowledge and present the difference to a user, and this could be accomplished
within an RDF schema using a named graph (see for an
explanation of this). In the EDM, conversely, proxies are seamless in that they
accommodate differences by creating silos. Within one silo, one thing is true,
while within another silo, a different thing is true. The result is that, when a
user is viewing information, the differences are not apparent, only what is
valid within the user’s particular silo is visible. We place this concept of
seamlessness into dialogue with the privileged position of neutrality often
afforded to technological spaces: the EDM can claim a political neutrality
because it frames itself as a solution to a technological problem of data
representation. In fact, we argue that the EDM, like the other technologies that
together constitute the nebulous entity of Europeana, occupies a place of
enormous privilege in the way it chooses to represent its heritage collections,
a choice that is, in itself, inherently political.

This issue links back to the definitional void described above: the lack of
definition for a European cultural heritage in Europeana mirrors a lack of
definition around the European project more generally. Europeana operates as a
form of soft power and a somewhat indirect arbiter, making its power all the
more difficult to render visible. In entering into data agreements for
aggregation, cultural heritage institutions enter into the all and each dynamic:
the actions they take to exert authority over their own collections, while
perhaps raising their own profile through their partnership with Europeana, are
mutually constitutive of the governmental rationality of culture exercised by
the EC.

Conclusion

In this article, we have argued that the study of Europeana has much to
contribute to the debates about the relationship between technical expertise,
the representation of heritage, and the exercise of government. First, this case
study demonstrates the move of all and each; all and each is embedded in
Europeana’s very invitation to participate and it implicates its conception of
audiences in the same gesture. Second, it highlights the effects of a
definitional void: dominant power relations fill a definitional void. The
ambition of the EC is unity, but if and when it cannot express that directly,
particularly in the current fraught political environment, it instead chooses to
emphasize diversity. This is not a logically incompatible goal, but it moves
people in an indirect trajectory towards unity: the terms change, but the goal
does not.

The indirect movement towards unity is reflected in the development of the EDM, a
space that masks frictional aspects of its networks and relationships . Those in charge of technological developments have
the power to remove themselves and their work from spaces of frictional
engagement wherein democratically important decisions might be taken. This is
accomplished by purposefully focusing on the technological problem – and its
resolution – in order to depoliticize it. Hence, the problem of representing
different and potentially conflicting national heritage collections becomes a
technical conversation about technical problems. However, we argue that such
conversations cannot happen without reference to social and political frameworks
even though these tensions are masked in the organizational language of
Europeana and the EC.

Friction, as Tsing describes it, has the potential to be productive . In the realm of metadata, a move towards
translation across schemas, as opposed to the ongoing creation of new schemas
that vie for dominance, could be one result of productive friction: such
friction both requires and allows communities to come into contact.
Professionalizing the task of data model creation, to unify and standardize
metadata across cultural heritage institutions, is an elegant solution to a
difficult problem, even if Europeana’s use of RDF is a somewhat inelegant use of
an ostensibly straightforward framework. But the professionalized environment in
which Europeana was created is also a political one, underpinned by the drive
for European cohesion, as we have shown in this article. As such, there is no
requirement to open such processes up to debate in ways that preclude the
project’s European character, or to create a space for
dialogue as part of the development process.

Yet, as we have also argued, technical solutions for political problems do not
necessarily work, even when they work. Responding to the
questions this article raises, increasingly so because of the current
uncertainty surrounding the future of the EU, demands openness of process
without assuming total interoperability. To that end, we propose a challenge to
the idea of interoperability as total – and seamless – assimilation. There are
ways in which interoperability could be productively frictional but are not,
because of the discourses of neutrality around technology and because of the
political forces motivating Europeana’s technological development. Europeana is
not neutral, it is a project and tool aimed at promoting European unity. The
totalizing and individualizing move of unity in diversity does not take account
of the way different heritages also work against each other, creating a space of
friction. It is from this space of friction, we argue, that we can find the
means to fill a definitional void in a way that contests existing power
relations. This friction has the potential to allow tools like Europeana to be
used in a recuperative fashion, rather than as a technique of government on a
supranational scale.

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to acknowledge the collegial support of Dr. David Dubin in the
research and writing of this article.